Ecclesiastes 12:6

Or ever the silver cord be loosed.— Remember thy Creator, I say, before the silver cord be removed, and the golden pully hasteneth its motion, and the jar be dashed to pieces upon the well, and the conduit be broken, through which the water used to run into the cistern. See the note on Ecclesiastes 12:2. It is on all hands allowed, that the picture-part of the emblem in this verse is a well once richly furnished with whatever is necessary both to draw water and to convey it to the proper places; but now becoming useless through the gradual decay of the several parts of the engine. To understand it right, therefore, it is necessary that we should have some notion of the thing described. It may be reasonably supposed, that kings and princes had such engines in their gardens as that to which our body is likened, either to supply their baths, or for the conveniency of watering; but the simplicity of those times, and the little progress then made in mechanical arts, may easily have persuaded us that they were of the less composed kind. Solomon tells us, chap. Ecclesiastes 2:6 that he had made ponds or reservoirs in his gardens; and the richness of the materials of which the several parts of the engine were made, may afford some reason to conjecture that the description in hand alludes to a machine which he had made to supply them with water. The several things necessary for that purpose, and which we may therefore expect to find mentioned in the description, were, besides the well itself, and a cistern or reservoir placed at a convenient distance, 1. A rope. 2. A pulley, to haul up and let down the rope more commodiously. 3. A bucket, or some other vessel in the nature of a bucket, hanging from the rope. 4. A conduit or gutter to convey the water from the upper edge of the wall which surrounded the well, to the reservoir. These several pieces, when in right order, may very well represent the hydraulic machine called a man; and of course their disorder is a proper image of the distempers whereby the constitution of our body is broken in old age. But, to apply every particular to that special circumstance of human infirmities which Solomon intended it should represent, is not an easy task; as it depends upon the notions which that prince had of the inward structure of our body, and of the office of each part: no one can be qualified to explain it who has not a competent skill in ancient anatomy; I say ancient, for it is not to be presumed that Solomon could or would allude to discoveries whereby he must have then been unintelligible; and Hippocrates himself, the father of physic, is but a modern with respect to our author. Therefore I content myself with explaining the letter of the allegory, and leave the accurate deciphering of it to professed anatomists; upon whose opinion, however, I would not advise the reader to place too great a dependence; as their decision, in this case, cannot be much better than conjecture. See Desvoeux, who has very largely and learnedly justified the above version, as the reader will find in the 376th and following pages of his essay. However, for the satisfaction of such as would wish to see some attempt to decipher this allegory, we shall subjoin at the end of this chapter such an attempt by an able writer; at the same time referring such as wish to see more on this subject, to the famous portrait of old age by Dr. Smith.